Among the bars in my soap collection. Never mind.
Later.
Among the bars in my soap collection. I paid big cash for it. Argentine vacation hotel week-end shack-up with Edith. Never mind that. I paid equivalent U.S. $635. Waiter giving me the eye for days. He not cute little recent immigrant. Former Lord of few miserable European acres. Transaction beside swimming pool. I wanted it. I wanted it. My lust for secular gray magic. Human soap. A full bar, minus the wear of one bath in which I plunged myself, for better or for worse.
Mary, Mary, where are you, my little Abishag?
My dear friend, take my spirit hand.
I am going to show you everything happening. That is as far as I can take you. I cannot bring you into the middle of action. My hope is that I have prepared you for this pilgrimage. I didn’t suspect the pettiness of my dream. I believed that I had conceived the vastest dream of my generation: I wanted to be a magician. That was my idea of glory. Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic.
That week end when I arranged for you to work in the Archives, Edith and I flew down to Argentine for a little sun and experiments. Edith was having trouble with her body: it kept changing sizes, she even feared that it might be dying.
We took a large air-conditioned room overlooking the sea, double-locking the door as soon as the porter had left with his hand full of tip.
Edith spread a large rubber sheet over the double bed, carefully moving from corner to corner to smooth it out. I loved to watch her bend over. Her buttocks were my masterpiece. Call her nipples an eccentric extravagance, but the bum was perfect. It’s true that from year to year it required electronic massage and applications of hormone mold, but the conception was perfect.
Edith took off her clothes and lay down on the rubber sheet. I stood over her. Her eyes blazed.
– I hate you, F. I hate you for what you’ve done to me and my husband. I was a fool to get mixed up with you. I wish he’d known me before you –
– Hush, Edith. We don’t want to go over all that again. You wanted to be beautiful.
– I can’t remember anything now. I’m all confused. Perhaps I was beautiful before.
– Perhaps, I echoed in a voice as sad as hers.
Edith shifted her brown hips to make herself comfortable, and a shaft of sunlight infiltrated her pubic hair, giving it a rust-colored tint. Yes, that was beauty beyond my craft.
Sun on Her Cunt
Wispy Rusty Hair
Her Tunnels Sunk in Animal
Her Kneecaps Round and Bare
I knelt beside the bed and lay one of my thin ears on the little sunlit orchard, listening to the tiny swamp machinery.
– You’ve meddled, F. You’ve gone against God.
– Hush, my little chicken. There is some cruelty even I cannot bear.
– You should have left me like you found me. I’m no good to anyone now.
– I could suck you forever, Edith.
She made the shaved hairs on the back of my neck tingle with the grazing of her lovely brown fingers.
– Sometimes I feel sorry for you, F. You might have been a great man.
– Stop talking, I bubbled.
– Stand up, F. Get your mouth off me. I’m pretending that you are someone else.
– Who?
– The waiter.
– Which one? I demanded.
– With the mustache and the raincoat.
– I thought so, I thought so.
– You noticed him, too, didn’t you, F.?
– Yes.
I stood up too suddenly. Dizziness twirled my brain like a dial and formerly happy chewed food in my stomach turned into vomit. I hated my life, I hated my meddling, I hated my ambition. For a second I wanted to be an ordinary bloke cloistered in a tropical hotel room with an Indian orphan.
Take from me my Camera
Take from me my Glass
The Sun the Wet Forever
Let the Doctors Pass
– Don’t cry, F. You knew it had to happen. You wanted me to go all the way. Now I’m no good to anyone and I’ll try anything.
I stumbled to the window but it was hermetically sealed. The ocean was deep green. The beach was polka-dotted with beach umbrellas. How I longed for my old teacher, Charles Axis. I strained my eyes for an immaculate white bathing suit, unshadowed by topography of genitalia.
– Oh, come here, F. I can’t stand watching a man vomit and cry.
She cradled my head between her bare breasts, stuffing a nipple into each ear.
– There now.
– Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.
– Listen, F. Listen the way you wanted us all to listen.
– I’m listening, Edith.
Let me let me follow
Down the Sticky Caves
Where embryonic Cities
Form Scum upon the Waves
– You’re not listening, F.
– I’m trying.
– I feel sorry for you, F.
– Help me, Edith.
– Then get back to work. That’s the only thing that can help you. Try to finish the work you began on all of us.
She was right. I was the Moses of our little exodus. I would never cross. My mountain might be very high but it rises from the desert. Let it suffice me.
I recovered my professional attitude. Her lower perfume was still in my nostrils but that was my business. I surveyed the nude girl from my Pisgah. Her soft lips smiled.
– That’s better, F. Your tongue was nice but you do better as a doctor.
– All right, Edith. What seems to be the trouble now?
– I can’t make myself come any more.
– Of course you can’t. If we’re going to perfect the pan-orgasmic body, extend the erogenous zone over the whole fleshy envelope, popularize the Telephone Dance, then we’ve got to begin by diminishing the tyranny of the nipples, lips, clitoris, and asshole.
– You’re going against God, F. You say dirty words.
– I’ll take my
